Aerial Resources #1: Act Up! Challenge

One of the well-known aerial studios in Los Angeles is Womack and Bowman — The Loft.
The studio was founded by Brett Womack and Rachel Bowman, both of whom have performed professionally on stages around the world, including television, film, and large-scale live events. Their aim is to approach aerial not merely as fitness, but as an artistic and professional discipline.

In their creative work and teaching, they place particular attention on musicality, flow, transitions, and the different pathways into and out of individual skills. I got to join a few practice sessions there myself. (It is also a good memory of mine that I happened to meet, at the studio, a male aerialist whose videos I had been secretly studying on YouTube, and we ended up getting quite excited about it.)

The main drawback, at least for me, was the location. The studio is a bit far from central Los Angeles (and from my home) so I never went often enough to say that I really trained there. But The Loft does not only offer in-person lessons and training at the studio; it also provides online materials that students around the world can use.

Among those materials, I want to introduce one that I found useful when making my own routine structure and choreography: an online resource called the “Act Up! Challenge.” It comes with video explanations, and since it is completely free, anyone can use it quite casually.

(I registered from here ↑ and was able to receive the materials for free.)

According to the materials, every aerial routine and choreography that Womack and Bowman have created over more than 15 years has been made through the steps introduced in this program. I will leave the details to the actual materials, but roughly speaking, the process is as follows.

Decide and learn the tricks
This is perfectly obvious, but first you imprint the basic form of the skills/tricks you want to include in the routine into your body.
Succeeding a few times is not enough. Hands, arms, hips, chest, legs, shoulders — in other words, every part of the body needs to know where it should be in space, and at what timing. Each skill should be successfully repeated something like twenty times, until it becomes part of your body’s memory.
Create the flow
The next step is editing.
Is there any decoration you can add to the basic forms learned in Step 1? Is there any unnecessary moves you can remove?
For example, can you eliminate one re-grip? Can you add a beautiful pose in the middle of a wrap? In this way, you adjust each individual skill while connecting multiple skills into a single flowing line.
In my case, this is the phase where I add and subtract various tiny graft-like arrangements I have collected from Instagram and YouTube — details too small to call skills in themselves — placing them before and after the main skills, combining and integrating them almost like a collage.
Set it to the music
First, you listen to the music many times on the ground and imagine your own movement on the silks. You dissect and understand the structure of the music: the crescendos, the climaxes, the silences, the afterglow.
Once the image begins to take shape, you climb the silks and start fitting the flow you wove together in Step 2 into the framework of the rhythm. More concretely, as in a dance lesson, you count 1, 2, 3, 4, and place each movement onto those beats one by one. Of course, if it is a waltz, you would count 1, 2, 3; the point is to fit the movement into the rhythm the music already has, and then fix it there.
By doing this, the routine begins, for the first time, to acquire a certain objective repeatability.
Add emotion, artistry, and individuality
After completing Steps 1 through 3 — in other words, once the flow of the skills has been completed and aligned with the musical counts — the final step is to turn the routine into a story that only you can tell.
You take the story that resonates most deeply with your own emotions and thread it quietly through the whole choreography, letting it breathe from inside the movement. (In fact, the more personal the story is, the more intensely the feeling burns inside the movement.)
You give the routine meaning, so that it becomes not merely a sequence of skill, skill, skill, but something closer to a work of art.
As I understand it, this means making aerial not only a display of technical ability or beauty, but also a way of showing your emotion as it is.

That, more or less, is the idea. (Though my own bias has mixed itself in..)

The content itself is very sound and simple, even textbook-like, but as a system, it has clearly been refined through more than 15 years of running a studio, and I think that if you make choreography through this process, you are unlikely to go badly wrong.

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In practice, I made almost all of my own routine structure and choreography myself. I did not hire a choreographer. So while drawing on the Act Up! Challenge, I also wove my routines together according to my own completely self-invented method, which I may introduce somewhere else at some point.
Of course, I had the very luxurious help of being able to rely on a coach with extensive stage experience, including floor work, and I was able to use her as a sounding board and consult with her a great deal. Still, I could not resist the desire to build my own routine myself, until I was satisfied with every part of it.
For stubbornly particular aerialists like me (and yes, a few friends’ faces are crossing my mind as I write this...), materials like this may be a useful tool for taking one’s non-negotiable obsessions and working them into an actual piece.

What helped me most, personally, was the step of fixing the motion for each count in precise detail. Until then, I had been performing in a somewhat vague way, roughly matching the music, but once I began fixing the movement for each count, my performance became much more stable and improved quite a lot. It also makes practice much easier when things are decided that clearly.

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Of course, there are also more intuitive ways of making choreography: playing music you like, improvising to it a few times, and adopting whatever felt good in the process.
One aerialist I respect used to say that this was how she always made choreography, more or less by improvising. People differ in what talents they have, what skills they have cultivated, and even in the reasons they do aerial in the first place. Everyone has their own style that suits them, so there is no need to follow every step one by one. You can make your routine in your own way.

And even after you think the choreography is finally complete, there will always be places that keep bothering you. Sometimes you make tiny adjustments; sometimes you perform major surgery. In the end, you keep reshaping it into something beautiful, like tending a bonsai (or like standing in front of a mirror, chasing the final, impossible millimeter of bangs that apparently never quite agree to be completed).